Monday, October 12, 2009

On Science and Religion

Too many Christians these days are trying to reconcile their faith with science. “Maybe science is the how, and God is the why,” they will say. Unfortunately this makes them very poor Christians and even worse scientists, for religion and science are mutually exclusive.

Science requires a complete lack of passion and attachment. A theory is a good theory while it explains current observations and continues to predict future observations accurately. Even atomic theory, with its reams of repeatable observations and new observations being made daily as it predicted, is neither true nor false. In a sense it is both and it is neither. It might be hard for some scientists to ever accept that the atom doesn’t really exist, but as we delve further into quantum mechanics they may have to do just that.

Religion, on the other hand, demands both passion and absolute attachment. Religion is a matter of faith, and should not waiver regardless of observation. Religion need not justify itself with repeatable observations, and must in fact hold steady in the light of contradictory evidence. Religion is not based on personal observation, but rather folklore of previous observations which must be believed.

This isn’t to say that a religious person cannot be a good scientist, nor vice versa. For science and religion to co-exist within a single mind, however, they must be mutually exclusive. Where observation contradicts religion, it must be accepted dispassionately as the way the world works, which is independent of any concept of God. Where dogma contradicts observation, it must be taken on faith that it is so, regardless of the evidence at hand.

Personally I have no religion because I have seen too much contradiction within religion itself – but I have not abandoned it, nor would I abandon it, based on any contradiction with science for the two are, and should be, mutually exclusive.

2 comments:

Thank you. I disabled comments over there because some people have chosen to malign their own town by suggesting that the stories I've written are real accounts of people they know. In order to avoid such a libelous connection I had to disable the comments. Unfortunately I will also now have to disable them here to keep people from making such claims.